State can't spend its way to student achievement

It's budget time in Harrisburg, and, like clockwork, legislators are receiving demands for more money for public schools. But the annual increase in educational spending is not only misguided, it ignores the opportunity for savings in a difficult economy.

By prioritizing programs that save the taxpayers money, we also can produce successful students.

For years, the educational establishment has claimed that not enough is being spent on public schools -- that if more money is pumped into the system, student achievement will improve. Unfortunately, too many policymakers have bought into the "more dollars equals more scholars" myth.

Last year, Governor Rendell proposed increasing public school funding by $2.6 billion over the next six years in an effort to bring spending to the "necessary" level recommended in the General Assembly's "Costing Out Study."

Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly, while expecting a different result. For the last quarter century, in response to growing concerns from parents and the business community over lagging test scores and a lack of readiness for adult life, America has been trying to spend its way to student achievement.

Pennsylvania is not the exception to the rule. The amount of tax dollars invested in the Pennsylvania public school systems over this period is staggering:

So if we follow the education establishment's logic, because we've doubled the amount of money we are spending on public education in Pennsylvania, we should be getting much better results from our public schools today than what we were getting in 1980, right? Wrong. Consider: In 1986, Pennsylvania students, on average, had an SAT score of 1,000. Flash forward to 2008, and the average SAT score has dropped to 995.

In our opinion, the reason that we are seeing modest gains in our student's NAEP scores over the last few years is not because we are spending more money on our public school system, it is because we are allowing greater numbers of students access to an education that is better suited to their individual educational needs.

Since the mid-1990s, Pennsylvania has seen the introduction of several innovations that are making a real difference in how our students are educated. The growth of charter schools, and more recently of cyber charter schools, has allowed numerous families to find another nontraditional public school that better meets their educational needs. And, since 2001, Pennsylvania's Educational Improvement Tax Credit Program has been providing scholarships to tens of thousands of students to attend a nonpublic school that is a better fit for them.

The result of these education options has been to allow about 15 percent of students in Pennsylvania to move from an educational system that is not working, to one that is. Simply put, more choice - not more money for public schools - is the way to ensure student achievement and save taxpayers money.